Earlier this month, we shared a few early insights on retail search trends for this year’s Christmas shopping season. And from what historical data tells us, over the next five weeks shopping-related search traffic is really going to accelerate.

Over the previous few years, searches for "Christmas" specific questions have climbed fast starting the third week of November. Thus far searches are up year over year in all major retail categories. This year’s big winners include mass merchant retailers (searches up 47%), food and drink (+31%), and toys (+28%).

Over the past few years, a distinctive search pattern has evolved around the Christmas season:

During the first week of December, shipping windows for international online retailers traditionally close and searches for domestic online retailers rise.

Two weeks before Christmas, searches for store names plus ‘trading hours’ or ‘location’ begin to rise dramatically. Last year, searches for trading hours grew nearly 250% in the last two weeks before Christmas. This year, such searches are already up 37% year over year -- and over a third of these searches now comes from a mobile device.

Around December 16th, the last day Australia’s online retailers can guarantee delivery before December 25 and the last in-store retail weekend before Christmas, you can see another big spike in searches for store name plus “hours” and “location”.

Here are three tips from Google for retailers who are reviewing their online ad strategies for the holidays.

1. Review your search ad budget & timing: Santa brings a big increase in shopping search traffic -- make sure you don’t run out of search ad budget too early in the day. Last year, some Google advertisers used up their daily search ads budgets only 1/3 of the way into the Christmas trading day because their daily ad budgets were the same as the middle of the summer. That’s like forgetting to put your most popular product out on shelves during the busiest season of the year.

2. Anticipate key shopping days: Try to anticipate when your customers will be researching and buying gifts online and when they’ll be looking for stores. For example, if you’re a large retailer you may want to focus your search ads on e-commerce queries until mid-December and then shift to ads featuring in-store promotions, maps, and trading hours thereafter.

3. Be ready for mobile: Mobile shopping searches have risen 220% year over year. All retailers should be ready with mobile-friendly websites that prominently display store hours and locations to accommodate people looking for their stores on mobile. Already, over 30% of such searches come from mobile, and we expect that number to rise further during the crucial last 14 days.

Posted by Ross McDonald, Head of Retail, Google Australia & New Zealand